So they invented boats that can travel across the ocean, but after more than ten thousand years they never invented the wheel?
And we have consensus on this?
And we have consensus on this?
> Archaeology has now revealed that the wheel wasn’t invented until the 4th millennium BC – which puts it thousands of years after the first cities were built and after the invention of metallurgy, and its importance in determining the intelligence of a race is no longer rational.
Boats solve a more basic problem. No-one needs wheels - there are other means of transportation available.
Also, the above article points out that Mesoamericans seem to have independently invented the wheel, and even made wheeled toys.
You could say something similar about the Polynesians, although they came later
Ah, this might turn in to a "What has the wheel ever done for us" sketch after the style of Monty Python.
(Try making a decent sized wheel out of a plank - it'll shatter along the grain. Getting a snug 90 degree hole for the axle isn't trivial, either, and without that the wheel will wobble so badly it'll be largely useless.)
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbarr...
A solid one is easier to make, but will be very heavy and have severe durability problems.
You also have never seen a machine in your life. You have nothing at all to guide or inspire you.
Wheels might have been invented and then abandoned and forgotten multiple times, because they were too hard to make and not that useful.
From a piece of wood hanging on notched or Y shaped branches on which to hang meat for smoking/cooking to a spit to a pulley doesn't seem to far?
A simple barrow is a couple of sticks with a pulley. Though the utility over a simple dragged carrier is not much.
"Circumstantial evidence, such as the early settlement of Australia over 40,000 years ago, findings in Crete dated 130,000 years ago,[4] and findings in Flores dated to 900,000 years ago,[5] suggest that boats have been used since prehistoric times. ... The oldest recovered boat in the world is the Pesse canoe, a dugout made from the hollowed tree trunk of a Pinus sylvestris and constructed somewhere between 8200 and 7600 BC" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boat
"The invention of the wheel falls into the late Neolithic, ... 4500–3300 BCE: Chalcolithic, invention of the potter's wheel; earliest wooden wheels (disks with a hole for the axle); earliest wheeled vehicles, domestication of the horse" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel
Inventing a canoe or a raft is of course much easier than inventing the wheel, you just go on the shore of a river or at the seaside and you will find trunks or wooden pieces floating.
From that to have a boat capable of crossing an ocean there is a long way.
Also, the numbers would be important.
I would presume that leaving from a shore in search of another one (and knowing nothing on where that could be) would have been an extremely dangerous attempt, most probably taken by a handful of young males (hunters/gatherers, etc.) in the hypothesis that society was a male dominated one, possibly in very small/basic boats.
Then they would need to go back home, and then return bringing with them their spouses and presumably children.
Think of a future archaelogist in - say - 5,000 years time (after humanity and civilization collapsed) finding ONLY a hut with a few (perfectly conserved) surf tables and windsurfs.
From that finding to believe that windsurfs could be used for cross-sea or cross-ocean migrations there is somehow a large gap.
I don't understand what the point of your comment is.
The first humans in the Americas didn't need to cross an ocean. They needed to follow the shoreline. Even now the Bering Straight is only 90 km across. As the article points out, during the Ice Age, when the sea was lower, it was all land, known as Beringia. There was no "cross-sea or cross-ocean migration".
We know humans 60,000+ years ago could cross the Weber Line, which was also at least some 90 km wide, to get from Sunda to Sahul (which includes modern Australia). This migration to the Americas would have been easier than that.
Regarding male dominated society, hunter-gatherer cultures tend to be egalitarian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer#Social_and_eco... . One hypothesis is that male dominated culture is a result of agriculture, and specifically the horse and plow. http://voxeu.org/article/modern-gender-roles-and-ancient-far... . However, I this is a topic I know little about. I bring it up as an example of why I am confused about the point of your comment and where you're coming from.
I was actually supporting the idea that inventing the boat is (should be) easier than inventing the wheel BUT that between inventing the boat and actually being able of building big enough boats AND boats being able to cross large stretches of water AND actually using them to "migrate" a population there are some leaps.
The grandparent comment was not about "boats", was about "boats that can travel across the ocean" and the article was about the hypothesis of a migration by boat.
That requires neither a big boat nor one which can cross large stretches of water. That's why I didn't understand where your comment fit into the topic.
They're easily big enough to cross the Bering Strait (in fact, before the Cold War, they did it routinely) and can be constructed completely from local materials (sea mammal hide covering, whale bones and driftwood for ribs -- modern umiaks often use metal fasteners, but traditional ones didn't).
Alaska Natives still prefer them for some tasks (e.g., whale hunting).
Yet it was how the Polynesians settled the Pacific.
I mean, there are photographs from that era.